JeanC Reviews...

I have to say it, I love dollar stores. I love being able to go in with $10 and come out with 10 items. I love going in and finding neat stuff. I love being able to stock up on snacks and not break the budget. But I don't love everything in the dollar store. There are times you are actually paying more for an item then you would in a regular store, esp when you consider cost per ounce or such. Plus you sometimes don't get the quality of regular store stuff. Case in point, I will NEVER buy coffee at the dollar store again. It was an off brand and I ended up composting the unused grounds the coffee from it was so foul and I usually buy the cheap stuff from the grocery store. I also won't buy oven cleaner there again. It said low fumes. If that was low fumes, I'd hate to buy the non-low fumes stuff. Dead of winter and I had the windows and doors open and fans running. Danged near gassed us out of the house. But I love buying a lot of my dishes, glassware and kitchenw...

For the last number of years Hollywood has been attempting to bring comic books to the big screen. For the most part, they have failed miserably. Tim Burton's Batman in 1989 was quite good, Iron Man in 2008 was not bad, tho it didn't quite hit the mark as far as I am concerned (but after having my doubts, Robert Downey Jr did pull off Tony Stark quite nicely). All the Spidermans were too damned angsty. I will hold out opinion on Green Lantern and Thor until I can see them on DVD, they did not look good enough to spend money going to the theatre to see, even at matinee prices. Captain America on the other hand..... First off, what magic did they use to make 6' 1/2" Chris Evans into a 5' what ever nothing, 98 lb weakling?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Chris may be familiar to people as Johnny Storm from the Fantastic 4 movies (and I won't even go there in what I thought about those. Suffice to say I am glad I didn't pay money to see them). Here he is able to shine ...

I am always on the look out for pasta that I can eat. I have one brand of brown rice pasta that I love, but it is a bit on the pricey side for our budget, so I usually only buy the spaghetti for special occasions. So I was happy to see that the Grocery Outlet we shop at in Lewiston ID has started carrying more gluten free products and in specific brown rice spaghetti. So I grabbed a couple of packages. I decided that I had to do spaghetti for dinner that weekend, so I started my sauce and when it was close to dinner time, broke out my favorite pasta pot. Filled it with water, tossed in some salt and set it to boil. Once boiling I added the spaghetti and set my timer for 7 minutes (instructions were for 7-10 minutes). At 7 minutes it was getting there and was pretty much at the right texture by 10 minutes. I drained the pasta and then set to plating and topping with it with sauce and cheese and it was dinner time. The flavor of the pasta was good, hubby actually prefers bro...

Last month I was in Vancouver WA and wandered into the Grocery Outlet there on the advice of a friend who said they carried gluten free pastas and picked up a few packages of various types the above tube pasta, shell pasta, fusilli, spaghetti and fettuccine. I haven't tried the long pastas yet, opting for the shell pasta to start as I wanted to do a pasta salad on a recent hot weekend. I read the instructions and grabbed my favorite pasta pot and set to work. At 9 minutes I found the pasta to be still very crunchy, so kept it cooking. I also found the water thickened quite a bit and that my favorite pasta pot was much too small to cook a whole package (it works with regular wheat pastas) and even cooking it longer couldn't get it to the texture that would be acceptable for both hubby and I (I prefer al dente, he prefers softer and I can usually come up with a compromise). I drained the pasta and rinsed it and let it cool down and then proceeded to make a pasta salad with ...

I do love going to the dollar store, you can find all sorts of things that are good (and a few that aren't, but that will be another review. On one of my most recent trips I found a corned beef hash I'd never heard of: The one problem with dollar stores tho is you can't always get the same brand of something you like. I've been haunting their food aisle for a while since they used to carry another brand of corned beef hash I loved, but haven't stocked it in a while. So I picked up the can to check the ingredients list and saw the lovely words "contains no allergens". YAY! Gluten-free! Food manufacturers manage to sneak gluten products into some of the oddest items, so it was nice to see I could eat it safely. My favorite way to have corned beef hash is fried, topped with an egg or two, sunny side up. Alas, since I decided these were for lunches at work I had to settle for heated up in the microwave. Corned beef hash is naturally greasy, esp th...

Way back in 1985 Coca Cola came out with "New Coke" and ran into a tempest. People didn't like it, more importantly I didn't like it. A couple months later they gave in and brought out "Coca-Cola Classic". Only problem was they changed the formula to use high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar. Most people didn't mind, but I never found Coke Classic to be as good as original Coke. Fast forward a number of years and I discover in Newfoundland a bottle of Coca Cola, made with cane sugar. This is when I learned that Coke in other countries is usually made with sugar and not HFCS. Unfortunately, Newfoundland is on the other side of the country from where I live and I can't get up to Canada enough to find a supply there. Imagine my happiness a couple years ago to find that Costco was carrying Mexican Coke made with sugar. I was in heaven and would buy a flat or two when I shopped there. Imagine my dismay when Costco stopped selling Coca Cola produc...

I have just one thing to say...OH...MY...GODDESS!!!! This restaurant opened in Coeur d'Alene recently and we simply had to try it. We got our opportunity on Saturday when we had to drive up to do some shopping. We got there a bit before 3 for a late lunch and there were still a few patrons there, most out on the patio. We opted for sitting inside. Our waiter arrived and asked if we had eaten there before, so he explained how the full Churrasco (pronounced shoo-RAS-koo) experience worked and of course we said yes (why go to a Brazillian steakhouse and not experience it properly). He then took our drink orders (iced tea) and left the red/green discs we would be needing: Green means we wanted more meat and red meant we were not ready for more or we were done. I tended to keep mine very close at hand to flip back to green if I saw a skewer coming with something I wanted LOL! First up tho was a visit to the buffet for salad and side dishes: There were so many choices, b...

A while back a small restaraunt was opened up in Troy at a remodeled gas station and is called The Filling Station . We've been driving by for a while and kept telling ourselves we had to stop in some time and check them out. After we determined I was gluten intolerant I figured there wouldn't be much I could have besides coffee, tea and maybe a salad. So imagine my delight a couple weeks back when my mom and I drove by and I caught a glimpse of a sign that said gluten free (at least I thought it did, we didn't go back to check). I looked them up and sure enough, there was an post on their Facebook page saying they had gluten free options. YAY!!!!!!! So today we went for a late lunch. They have a few items on the menu :D and a fair selection of desserts: Deciding what to order was hard, everything sounded delicious. Finally decided and ordered. I went up and said "gluten free?!?!?" and the gentleman at the counter smiled and said they had optio...

In which I will review what ever I want.